Search Engine Rankings in the U.S. for December, 2006

Google sites accounted for nearly half of all U.S.-originated searches in December last year, a 0.4 share point increase over the previous month. That’s according to data released by comScore Networks‘s qSearch product.

Search volumes increased in December. A total 6.7 billion searches were conducted online in the U.S. market, a 1 percent increase searches in November. Search query volumes are up 30 percent over December 2005.

The search engine with the largest share of searches in December was Google (47.3 percent) with a total 3.2 billion search queries. Yahoo sites were in second place at 28.5 percent, which equaled 1.9 billion searches. The two companies experienced an increase in share size of 0.4 percent and 0.3 percent, respectively.

Microsoft sites, Ask, and Time Warner (including AOL) lost search shares in December. MSN Microsoft served 713 million queries; Ask handled 363 million, and Time Warner turned out 335 million queries.

qSearch is part of comScore’s Online Search Solutions which measures 20 of the top search sites including aol.com, google.com, yahoo.com, and others to report metrics for the U.S. Internet population. It also provides worldwide, U.S. work, home, and university breakouts. comScore releases data collected from its opt-in user panel.